A/N: Because I've never written Martha before, because I ended up talking about this topic over lunch with my old head of year on a French train, and because I then had to excuse myself to grab a notebook and start scribbling.

Toast Topics

"Do you want to exist after you die?"

This, the Doctor reflected, was an occupational hazard of having students on board the TARDIS. Never mind that Martha was a medical student and as such should have been one of the typical science-y lot who thought everything could be explained neatly and logically, she was student enough to come up with completely random philosophical questions right in the middle of breakfast.

"Blimey, that's a topic and a half to have over toast," he said.

She shrugged. "Just popped into my head."

He looked at her, suddenly wary. "You're not religious, are you?"

"Course I'm not," she answered, rolling her eyes. "I've been here how long now, and have I ever mentioned religion?"

"You've taken the Lord's name in vain a few times," he noted dryly.

"Most people do," she defended herself, taking a bite of her Marmite on toast. The Doctor shuddered.

"And if most people jumped off cliffs..."

"I'm not a lemming!"

He bit off a large piece of his own marmalade slathered toast and attempted to answer around it. "Orsot. Eying artri—"

"Can't understand you."

He swallowed. "Course not. Lemmings aren't trying to commit mass suicide when they fall off cliffs. They just get pushed off by the crowd."

Martha rolled her eyes. Trust him to know something like that. "Wasn't originally the point of the conversation."

"No, it wasn't," he agreed. There was a brief pause. "What was?"

"I asked you if you wanted to exist after you died," she reminded him.

She wasn't sure where the notion had come from. Unlike a lot of students, Martha Jones was a morning person. This probably had a lot to do with the fact that she almost never went out at night. Consequently, her mind tended to wander near and far when she awoke, relishing the exercise and coming up with completely bizarre trains of thought, such as why it was that the word 'awkward' actually looked awkward, or perhaps whether her parents would have split up had they not had any children, or whether or not an afterlife would really be a good thing.

"Oh. Yeah."

He carried on eating his toast.

"Well?" she asked, a tad impatiently.

"I was just thinking!" he protested.

She rolled her eyes for the second time in as many minutes. It was a common occurrence in conversation with the Doctor. "Some of us don't have lifespans that can be measured in millennia, you know."

He looked at her seriously, now. "No, I don't want to exist after death."

She measured the look in his eyes. "Would it be too much to ask why?"

He shook his head round another gargantuan mouthful of toast. "Nah. I've lived for so long, I just want to rest, I suppose. I don't want a complete new life with the prefix 'after'. I don't buy into the concept of heaven. I wouldn't want to be confronted with everyone I ever knew. And bearing in mind it's death, you wouldn't be doing much, would you? I'd either die of boredom or die of guilt from remembering my life."

He said all this in such a casual sort of way that Martha struggled to remember exactly why he would feel so guilty. He was a plethora of contrasts, that man.

"I can't wrap my head round it, not existing," she confessed. "Cos even while you're asleep, you're still sort of there. Just can't get it, I suppose."

"It's an odd concept, I'll give you that," the Doctor mused.

Evidently he could easily comprehend it. You couldn't have an ego round the Doctor, that was for sure.

"They used to tell us those in college," Martha went on. "Like if the universe is expanding, what's on the other side?"

"Oh, that's a simple misunderstanding," the Doctor said. "You're assuming that there's only one universe. Add into the equation the billions upon trillions of parallels, and..."

He trailed off, for no reason that Martha could discern.

"But anyway!" he recovered. "It's simple enough."

"If you say so," she allowed, sipping now at a mug of coffee.

Medical students and coffee, now that was far harder to understand than what was on the other side of the edge of the universe. Of all the demographic groups to indulge in a highly-caffeinated drink too often...

"What about you?" he asked. "Would you want to exist after you died?"

She inclined her head in thought. "I don't know. That's kind of why I asked you. I mean, I want my memory to live on, but I'm not sure if I'd really want an afterlife. Especially if it's forever."

"Forever's overrated," he agreed.

He paused for a moment, and Martha got up to take her mug to the machine that seemed to function like a dishwasher, but looked more like a tumble dryer. How nothing got broken, she had no idea.

"I don't want to be remembered," the Doctor said abruptly.

Martha turned around, surprised. "Why not?"

He brushed the crumbs off his fingers. "There's a few reasons. For one thing, I wouldn't be around to defend myself from those remembering the dodgier of my bodies... But it's mainly because no matter what you might think of me, the majority of the universe wouldn't remember me fondly. Better to let them exist in peace without the memory of me."

"But what about people like me?" she argued. "This has been the best time of my life, and I wouldn't remember?"

He stood up to load his plate into the dishwasher/tumble dryer, not looking at Martha. "Ah, but that assumes that in deciding this, in my final moments, I'd care about anyone else." He turned back to her. "And I think, unless I've regenerated into someone completely unrecognisable, that for once I'm going to be wonderfully, gloriously selfish."

The terrible thing was that Martha honestly thought he deserved that.

"Very human," she commented.

He chuckled softly and shook his head. "No. That's very Time Lord."